LitCrawl: Why I Live In San Francisco

“Celebrating the final night of Litquake, San Francisco’s Literary festival, the Lit Crawl is the world’s largest free literary crawl, in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission district, where it all began.”

photo: Lee de Broff

This past Saturday night, I was one of 450 readers performing at LitCrawl. As a participant in Julie Michelle’s awesome photography series, ‘I Live Here: SF’, Julie asked me to write and share a story about my “relationship” with San Francisco. I begged my parents to attend, stood on a make-shift stage in Clarion Alley and joined a group of authors, each answering the question, “How We Came Here And Why We Stayed.”

This was the story I told:

My How I Got Here involves the birds and the bees. I was born here. I cannot claim any responsibility. In fact, my parents were born here. My grandparents were born here. I’m from here. I just happened that way.

For that very reason, I spent much of my life aggressively taking San Francisco for granted. And when choosing a college, I settled on a school in glamorous Philadelphia. Have you ever been to Philadelphia? It’s like Reno without the charm.

Philadelphia wasn’t actually that bad. But by the time December rolled around, I was completely over my East Coast adventure. Dirty snow, Amish people and 15 minutes to Delaware? Thank you, no.

Getting home for Christmas required a late night flight from Philly to St. Louis, and then the red-eye back to SFO. I’d get into San Francisco at 2 o’clock in the morning.

After arriving uneventfully in St. Louis, we were delayed by a snowstorm. I found myself stuck in 24B, the b*tch seat. On the aisle-seat next to me was a elderly man. And on the window to my right was a teenage mother holding an infant in her lap. The baby was, of course, hysterical for much of the flight.

I don’t blame him. It was a horrible, horrible flight.

This was 1996. I did not have a little television in front of me. I could crane my neck to watch a watered down version of “Jumanji”, or I could try and sleep. I figured I’d try and sleep. The man sitting next to me had fallen asleep.

You know how I could tell? He was screaming. He was a sleep-screamer. I’m not talking snoring. This man wasn’t a very, very loud snorer. He was screaming, yelling, hollering as if being harmed.

“Ahhhhhh!” He was screaming.

The was pre-9/11 domestic air travel. Everyone was way less uptight on airplanes. This guy subconsciously lost his s*** the entire way from Missouri to Modesto. No one batted an eye.

Teen mom on my right bounced this tiny child on her knee. He wouldn’t stop crying and nervously, she dug around in her bag for something to shut this kid up. Her big solution? She started feeding her baby an apple.

Because the baby, you know, didn’t have teeth, he immediately started choking on the apple.
“Oh my God!” She screamed. “My baby is choking.”

No one could hear her because the guy on the other side of me was, in case you’d forgotten, screaming in his sleep. “My baby!” She held him towards me. “Save my baby!”

So naturally, I stuck my fingers in a strange child’s throat and started digging around. I actually pulled a chunk of Granny Smith out of an infant on that flight.

I’d been travelling for hours and hours, travelling from the city I’d escaped to and just trying to get back to San Francisco for one measly Christmas break. I had a layover in Missouri, for chrissakes. It was becoming the longest trip of my life, each hour a different circle of hell.

I’m being punished, I figured. This is what happens when you dump San Francisco.

I was deaf by the time we began our descent into SFO. I was tired and uncomfortable, physically moving my body forward in the hopes of landing faster.

The screamer was waking up, the baby was crying with unobstructed lungs. We had almost made it.

At 2am, the wheels dropped onto the tarmac. Thus began the slowest taxi to the terminal I have ever experienced in my life. It was so dark out, the gates of SFO were lit up and glowing. They were so warm. They were so welcoming!

There in the terminal, among the people standing around, I could see the tiny silhouette of a middle-aged man with his nose pressed up against the glass like a little kid. He was watching our plane, his hands cupping his eyes so he could see outside.

It was my dad.

When I recognized him across that tarmac, inside that airport, much like my seat partner, I let out a scream.

There was nothing I would not do to get off that plane and run to my father. Evacuation slides, threats with a plastic knife, I was willing to suffer jail time just to get off that flight, just to get into the airport, just to get to San Francisco.

Because for me, San Francisco isn’t some city where I discovered myself. It’s not a bridge or a bay or a boy. My view of San Francisco will always be looking past a teen mom out a TWA window into an airport to see this guy right here. Because that’s when I knew I was home.

Beth Spotswood writes two columns a week for the Culture Blog and full time for CBS San Francisco, in addition to head-writing and co-hosting of the satire webshow, Necessary Conversation. Winner of the 1986 City of Mill Valley Fire Prevention Poster Contest, Beth can be found on Twitter, and in the real world, where she also exists.